Sunday, September 20, 2015

Since Galileo and Francis Bacon, science has been disruptive and anti-authoritarian. Astrology is too, but many scientists mistakenly believe astrology to be authoritarian and that is why they fight against it. Science is a method skeptical of claims. It replaces authority and dogmatic laws with evidence and statements of deductions and probable conclusions—its theory. Generally, scientists do not recognize astrological theory because it appears to be simply a black box of accumulated traditions. They do not want to look inside the box to see how the theory is structured and how the structures might provide evidence.

To claim that astrology is pseudoscience is an authoritarian and unscientific position. If scientists do not know of any evidence that supports astrology, they should declare astrology to be probably pseudoscience (equivalent to "all swans are probably white"). But there actually is strong evidence of astrological effects (black swans). The evidence is widely suppressed, most publicly in Wikipedia, the popular, crowd-sourced encyclopedia. The intent of those who actively suppress the evidence is to maintain that astrology is authoritarian. Yet this can only be accomplished by the enforcement of authoritarian-based rules and dogma. The end result is contradiction that uses the very argument it rejects.